Regionalism in AP Shunji Cui Department of Political Science School of Public Affairs Zhejiang University

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) The Original 5: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Since then, membership has expanded to include Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam  Now 10 members. A geo-political and economic organization, formed on 8 August 1967

The Main Purposes The Bangkok Declaration  Economic, Political, Cultural,,,, Cooperation The True Concerns  Domestic, and Regime Insecurity  Regional Stability

ASEAN: Viability Initially:  no much hope? Could not Survive?  Regional Cooperation  among developed nations? ASEAN not only survived,  but also provides an important and rich area of investigation into the study of security communities, and regionalism.  by the early 1990s its members could claim their grouping to be one of the most successful experiments in regional cooperation in the developing world

Integration Theory & The ASEAN Way Constrainment v. Socialization Political Integration & Functionalism Political integration requires some shared functional interests, so that political communities can be committed to ‘mutual programmes’ and to ‘act together’. Cooperation in one issue area can generate spill-over effects and lead to broader and deeper cooperation in other issue-areas. The spill-over effect can cause integration to stretch beyond functional components, thus resulting in cooperation on the social and political fronts. Ultimately, political loyalties may shift to new institutions

The ASEAN Way: socialization v. constrainment Asian institutions do not seek to “constrain” national policy in any deliberate way, at least to the extent envisaged by neoliberal theory. ASEAN thrived because, as its founders frequently stressed, it did not impose strict obligations on its members that would have constrained the pursuit of their national interests.

ASEAN’s founders called for recognizing and combining a “regional existence” and thinking with national interests, thinking, and identities. The ASEAN Way is thus primarily about socialization, not “constrainment”. The latter may result from the former, but it would have to be a voluntary, gradual, and collective change in attitude and behaviour.

ASEAN: Critiques 1 ASEAN’s failure to develop concrete institutional mechanisms and procedures for conflict resolution. the continuing differences and disagreements among its members over how to deal with non-members and external powers (such as the differences over ZOPFAN in the 1970s and over Vietnam in the 1980s). ASEAN’s tendency to deal with intra-mural conflicts by ‘sweeping them under the carpet’, rather than resolving them, and its slow pace and modest record in developing economic cooperation, could be cited as further testimony to the limitations of the ASEAN Way.

ASEAN: Critiques 2 In the late 1990s, ASEAN had been criticised for not dealing effectively with HR issues, or transnational problems such as the forest fires in Indonesia that have caused severe air pollution among neighbouring states. In the wake of AFC, ASEAN’s critics have also highlighted its inability to provide a united front in dealing with the challenges of globalisation. Finally, the ASEAN-led ARF was seen as little more than a talk-shop, much like ASEAN itself. The ASEAN Way of soft institutionalism and dialogue process seemed ineffectively in laying the foundations of an Asia Pacific regional order.

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